


Too Shy, Too Scared, Too Busy

by cyndisision



Series: Too Steve [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen, Internalized Transphobia, The Avengers are "helpful", Tony Stark Is a Good Bro, trans!Steve
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-03
Updated: 2014-09-03
Packaged: 2018-02-16 00:53:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2249802
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cyndisision/pseuds/cyndisision
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He's resigned himself to the thought that nobody will ever know him again, not really, not the way Bucky did, or Peggy—or even Howard, who apparently took the secret to the grave with him. He can share quarters and jokes and fights with these people, but he'll always be holding something of himself back.</p><p>In which Steve Rogers dodges his team's well-meaning (and nosy) attempts to get him a love life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Too Shy, Too Scared, Too Busy

**Author's Note:**

> This story uses a dialogue exchange from Captain America: The Winter Soldier as a jumping-off point, but it doesn't incorporate any of the events of that movie. Just pretend Steve & Natasha had that conversation earlier, sometime between The Avengers and Cap 2.
> 
> I've put a more detailed summary of the fic at the end, so if you're nervous about the "Internalized transphobia" tag you can decide whether or not you want to read it.
> 
> Thanks to sev for beta reading!

The needling has been going on for a while, now.  
   
"You know if you asked Kristen out, from Statistics, she'd probably say yes."  
   
"That's why I don't ask." He wiggles the communicator into his ear and hopes that's an end to the questioning.  
   
Tasha's too observant to have missed the body language, but she persists anyway. "Too shy, or too scared?"  
   
"Too busy." Yeah, let's go with that. He dives out of the back of the plane, maybe a couple of seconds before the ideal drop window, and lets the wind whip away the conversation.  
   
~*~  
   
At least Tasha left him an out. Tony gets between him and the gym showers and wants to know if he's 'tapped that' yet.  
   
He can tell from Tony's expression that this has to be some kind of a sex thing, but there's no need to give too much ground just yet. Months of experience tell him he's not going anywhere until after he's played a few rounds of conversational dodgeball, so he wipes the towel across his face and buys himself a few seconds by asking the obvious question: "Huh?" 

"Boned. Humped. Screwed. Made the beast with two backs." Tony must mistake Steve's growing horror for confusion, because he clarifies, "Had sex with, Cap. C'mon, that last one was Shakespeare, and I know they had that in your day." 

Steve sighs. "And who am I supposed to have... screwed?" 

Tony gets this look, like I got Captain America to say 'screwed'! He shakes it off and continues, "That waitress. Becky something?"  
   
"Beth."  
   
"Whatever."  
   
He rolls his eyes and reaches for the bag of freeze-dried mango in Tony's hand, but it's yanked out of his reach.  
   
"Nuh-uh. Deets first. Then snack."  
   
"Are you—are you obedience training me?"  
   
Tony just shrugs and pops another piece of fruit into his mouth. "Worked on Clint."  
   
"Lies!"  
   
Steve manages not to startle at the voice that echoes down into the gym from the observation gallery.  
   
"Not that it's any of your business, but no," he says in answer to Tony’s original question, sidesteps Tony while he's distracted, and heads for the showers at a brisk walk.  
   
He's laying his folded clothes on the bench when he hears the slap of bare feet on tile. Good thing he's already on edge, or he'd have jumped out of his skin.  
   
"Anyone ever told you it's rude to follow another fella into the shower, Stark?" he says without turning around. Act natural, he thinks, as he steps into the giant space-age shower stall and swishes the curtain closed behind him. He knows, intellectually, that people can't tell just by looking at him, but he feels vulnerable in the locker room nevertheless. 

"Chillax, Stevie," says Clint's voice. "Just need to rinse off. Target practice is sweatier work than it looks."  
   
"Don't call me that," mutters Steve, too low to hear, and when he looks down he sees he's crumpled the shampoo bottle beyond recognition, about half of the thick liquid running out between his fingers to mingle with the water that swirls around the drain.  
   
~*~  
   
"It's not going to work, you know," says Bruce, dicing an onion for Steve's pasta sauce.  
   
"Hmm?" Steve's preoccupied with browning the meat just right, plus he has no idea what Banner's talking about.  
   
"Evading the question. Well, any question, really, if Tony's on the case."  
   
"I'm not evading any—" Steve breaks off as he realizes just what question he's undeniably evading.  
   
"He wants a reason," Bruce mercifully goes on, as if that little moment of awkwardness never happened. "Make one up if you have to."  
   
"Lie, you mean."  
   
"Look, Steve, whatever you're hiding, someone's going to ferret it out. Your team consists of two spies and a guy who reads over classified files stolen from intelligence agencies instead of a morning newspaper." Bruce's hands still on the chopping board and he looks up, pushing his glasses up on his nose with a knuckle. "Whatever it is, surely it's not as bad as dodging your friends whenever they want to chat about, uh, you know, your personal life."  
   
Steve stands there silent, fiddling with the handle of a spatula while the bottom of the ground beef starts sticking to the pan.  
   
"So," Bruce goes on, "I know it was different back in the day, but if you're, uh, gay, or something—"  
   
"I'm not gay?" says Steve, way less convincing than he intended.  
   
"—nobody around here would care."  
   
Steve turns away, makes a big deal out of stirring the meat so he can pretend he's lost track of the conversation.  
   
He's not gay.  
   
Is he?  
   
How do you even determine these things when you're… in Steve's situation?  
   
~*~ 

"For the record, I don't actually care." Clint shifts his weight slightly and runs his hand over his bow where it rests on the parapet in front of him as if checking for the hundredth time that it's still there. 

"About whether HYDRA are in there?" Steve glares at the warehouse door again as if the sheer force of his frustration will make it give up intel. 

"No. Well, I mean, yeah. I'm starting to want to kick the door in no matter who it is. Seriously, who sends Avengers on stake-outs? It's a waste of—" Clint breaks off, shakes his head, and goes back to his original topic. "Anyway. What I mean is, you're acting like you have some big, dark secret, and nobody actually cares. Except for the purposes of winding you up." 

This time, Steve doesn't even pretend not to know what the topic is. "Is it so strange for someone to want to keep their private life private?" He's standing, trying not to loom or pace behind the crouching figure of Hawkeye, but his muscles twitch, desperate for action. 

"Stevie-boy, you were in the army. Since when is anything private?" 

"Don't call me that," he grits out, hands balled into fists at his sides. 

"Ooo-kaaay, Captain Rogers. I'm just saying, if you're a virgin, we all already know. You don't have to be—" 

"I'm not a virgin," he says, too quickly. 

Clint's eyebrows shoot up. "Well, well, well. What happened to that paragon of moral virtue, Captain America?" 

"That's—" Steve suddenly sees an out, and changes the direction of his sentence. "That's why I don't talk about it. Because people have these... expectations. And maybe I want to leave the past in the past." 

"That doesn't explain why you haven't been on so much as a date since—" 

Thankfully, that's when the door opens and two armed footsoldiers step out. Steve's never been so relieved to see a HYDRA uniform in his life. 

~*~ 

At some point, Natasha stops probing, and he doesn't notice for several weeks. She's either taken pity on him, or figured it out, and he knows better than to ask which. 

~*~ 

After the last team member arrives in the briefing room—uncharacteristically, it's Bruce, fresh from the lab, with his hair askew like he's been running his hands through it in exasperation—Fury hands out the mission folders. 

The photo clipped at the front is of a dark-haired woman, probably in her forties, with a strong jaw and a stern look. 

"...a diplomatic visit from Princess Stephanie of Monaco," Fury is saying. 

"Ooh, ooh, I've got it!" Tony raises his hand like a kid in class. "We'll get our Princess Stephanie here to stand in as a decoy," and he kicks Steve's boot under the table to get his attention. 

Steve takes a breath in, and for a moment he feels like his head is swimming, like all eyes in the room are on him, like they can see through his clothes and his evasions and the decades into his past. 

"Don't... call me that," he chokes, and reaches for the glass of water on the table in front of him. 

"Yeah," says Clint, warming to Tony's theme. He jabs a finger at the face in the photo. "She does look kind of mannish." 

"Stop." 

"Nobody would ever know." 

"Stop it." 

"What do you think, Princess?" 

"I think that's ENOUGH!" And the whole room is suddenly ringing with a thump that he realizes is his palm on the table, and he doesn't know how he got to be standing. 

Tony's scooted a couple of feet back and is holding up his hands in mock surrender. "Wow, Nat, did you know Cap hated girls that much?" 

"It's not— I'm not—" It's not an insult to be called a woman. It's just that I'm not one. 

When he dares risk a glance at Natasha, her face is perfectly neutral. It's Fury who's got the shrewd glint in his one eye. 

~*~ 

In one sense, this new life was a blessing, a chance to start over with people who didn't know him before. 

But he hates it. 

It hangs there, this secret, like a lead curtain between him and his friends. His team. The people he trusts to have his back in any fight. The people who should know him inside and out. 

He's resigned himself to the thought that nobody will ever know him again, not really, not the way Bucky did, or Peggy—or even Howard, who apparently took the secret to the grave with him. He can share quarters and jokes and fights with these people, but he'll always be holding something of himself back. 

He thinks the consensus has settled on "closeted queer," given the unsubtle hints about how cool his teammates are with gay marriage, or how true playboys have tried everything at least once, or this one time back in the circus... 

They're not so far off the mark, after all. There's even a word now for what he is—for one of the things he is. For someone who's interested in fellas as well as girls. If it were just that, he'd tell them. It would have to be better than this badgering. 

The rest of it, though. People would think him a freak. He'd lose their respect. And that's the real reason he doesn't get intimate with anyone, because if you can't share yourself with someone, even the ugly things you'd rather forget, then what's the point? 

"Everything special about you came out of a bottle." 

Tony was right in every way, except he didn't go far enough: everything about Steve, every single aspect of him that they know, came from that bottle. Without it, who was he? 

~*~ 

"Captain Rogers?" 

Steve looks up from his sketchbook and puts down his pencil. Even a disembodied voice coming out of nowhere deserves common courtesy. 

"Yes, JARVIS. What is it?" 

"Sir requests your presence in the workshop." 

"He...?" 

"Requests your presence, Captain." 

"That's very... formal," says Steve as he gets into the elevator. Normally Tony just busts in without knocking and is already halfway through his opening sentence by the time Steve's registered he's there. 

This time, he's sitting on a stool. Facing the door, which is a wonder, and fidgeting with a tablet computer on his lap. Waiting. 

Steve looks around, but they're the only ones there. Tony just holds out the tablet. 

"What's this?" 

"Your file." 

"Oh?" He keeps his face neutral. Tony's seen all their files before, Steve knows that, even though he wasn't supposed to. He stole them off some S.H.I.E.L.D. server somewhere. 

"Your real file." 

Steve's heart stops. His mouth is dry, and his fingers are numb, but he tightens them and manages not to drop the tablet. 

"Took some digging, let me tell you." 

Steve doesn't want to look, but his hand is a traitor and swipes the black screen to wake up the computer. 

And there it is. 

There's the picture of Steve, his shoulder-length hair styled into a neat victory roll, his WAC uniform trim and tidy at his waist, his lips dark with lipstick. If the photo had been in color, you could've seen that it was red. 

"Stephanie Grace Rogers." 

"Don't call me that," Steve whispers, unable to keep the misery from his voice. 

"Born July 4, 1918. Attempted to enlist in the Army five times; rejected." Tony's picked up a screwdriver and is tapping it on his leg as he talks. "Briefly enlisted in the Women's Army Corps before being recruited into the Strategic Scientific Reserve for Project Rebirth. Gets a bit vague after that. Seems they don't really understand why the Super Soldier Serum had the consequences it did." 

He gets up and paces over to Steve, puts his hand up as if to touch him, face full of wonder at this scientific curiosity. Steve flashes back to Peggy doing the same thing, a new light in her eyes, seeing him for the first time. 

"Must have been so weird," says Tony. 

And this is exactly what Steve didn't want. He's not sure exactly why this aspect of his physical change is harder for people to deal with than growing a foot in height or putting on more than 100lb, but it is. People acted weird about it then, and they'll act weird about it now. He wonders how long it'll take to pack a bag of just the things he really needs, how far out of New York he can be by morning if he gets on his motorbike right now. This life, this camaraderie he was just starting to build, it's already over. 

"I mean, you get in the machine with boobs, you come out with..." Tony gestures up and down with his screwdriver, taking in Steve's whole body. "Can't decide if that's a trade I'd make." He holds his chin, as if giving it some serious contemplation. 

And of course it's a joke. Everything's a joke. Steve just doesn't know if he can take being a joke; not about this. 

"Tony, please—" 

"Should I be calling you Steph?" 

"Please, no." 

"—just feels disrespectful, now I know you're a—" 

"I'm not a—" 

"—woman." 

Tony circles him, sizing him up. 

"I mean, the possibilities are endless. People would pay good cash money to do what you've done. Oh!" He grabs a chair and throws himself onto it while somehow also managing to slide over to another desk. A few swift gestures pull up a holographic display, showing the blueprints of the vita ray machine. "I could change you back!" 

"Tony—" 

"Not back to wimpy, of course," he says, sweeping and panning and zooming in on blueprints. "You'll want to keep the muscles and the healing factor and all that; I'm talking Linda Hamilton here, not Linda Evangelista. Though now I come to think of it..." He trails off, savoring the thought. 

"Tony!" 

"What?" 

"I don't want to go back." 

That, finally, stops Tony in his tracks. "I mean, yeah, I guess you'd have gotten used to it by now. You'd have a whole nother period of adjustment." 

"It's not that. It's...." Steve pauses. He wants, badly, to explain things to someone. Just to have it out in the open for once. And he's already decided he's leaving, so what harm can it do? "This is who I am. Not the muscles, the—the rest. If I didn't have responsibilities, I could take or leave the muscles. But," and here he lifts his chin, gazing vaguely into the back corner of the workshop. He can't look at Tony. "I'm not a woman." 

There's a pause, during which he starts deciding which of his paints will fit in his knapsack, and which he can do without. 

"Huh," Tony says. And then, like a lightbulb going on, "Huh!" 

Steve risks a glance at him. Tony's wearing this expression of—well, it can only be described as comprehension. 

"Care to fill me in?" 

"You're... you're trans!" 

If Steve had been hoping for things to suddenly become clear, he's disappointed. "I'm what?" 

"Transgender. It means you don't feel like the gender you've been stuck with." 

This is not going even remotely in the direction Steve expected it to. It's already headed off the edge of his map, and Tony's forging a trail into seriously uncharted territory. "No, I told you, I'm happy being a man." 

"But before that, when you were Steph—uh, the person you were before. You didn't feel like that was right." 

"I didn't like being told what I couldn't do, if that's what you mean." Steve's bizarrely grateful for Tony's clumsy effort not to say his old name. "It wasn't that I woke up every day wishing to be a man." 

"I think I'm saying this backwards. I guess it matters less whether you wanted to change, and more that once you did change, you realized it fit you better." 

This shouldn't be comforting, this dissection of Steve's current and former mental state, like some kind of science experiment, but Tony's matter-of-factness makes the knot in his stomach unravel a bit. Far from being disgusted, he seems genuinely interested in Steve's take on things. 

"So what happens now?" he finds himself asking. 

"Well, it's Tuesday, and no alarms are going off, so... taco night?" 

"No, I mean—" 

"I know what you mean, you big doofus," says Tony. "We fight crime, we argue about protocol, you get annoyed at Clint for leaving wet towels over the back of the bar stools. And tacos. I could definitely eat." 

He claps Steve on the shoulder and steers him toward the elevator. 

Steve feels his body flood with relief. Things can be normal. This doesn't have to ruin everything. 

"So," says Tony as the doors slide closed, in that tone that means he's about to ruin everything. "Are you gay?"

**Author's Note:**

> Summary:
> 
> The Avengers don't understand why Steve is single, so they keep trying to find him someone. The problem is, he was assigned female at birth (the super-soldier procedure masculinized him), and he doesn't want to have to disclose that to a potential partner. He is a bit angsty about "having to" withhold this information from his team.
> 
> Tony finds out his secret, and is really cool about it, in that Tony way that means he's also a complete ass. But a loving, friendly, reassuring ass.


End file.
